What is a Virtual Data Center and it Benefits

A Virtual Datacenter (VDC) is a collection of cloud-based resources that replace the need for you to operate your own datacenter. In practical terms, you no longer need to buy and house your own servers, and instead of them residing on your premises, you have access to virtual servers to which you give access to all of the business applications you use.

Rather than physical servers, you now have virtual servers, and this provides the ability to be flexible and to scale up as needed. In essence, you can have as many virtual servers as you will ever need and without the need to invest in purchasing, provisioning, housing and maintaining a physical machine.

Virtual DataCenter Benefits

There are a number of benefits to be gained by moving over to a Virtual Datacenter, and here is a brief overview:

Cost

Costs are reduced substantially from operating a VDC, not least as you no longer have the cost of buying the servers, provisioning and servicing them. However, there are other costs you will save on, not least your in-house IT team will no longer be required to service your in-house datacenter, which either frees up their time, or if you have an MSP, they no longer need to bill for travel time to and from your location to perform maintenance and upgrades.

Scalability

As your servers are now virtual, it is simple and easy to set-up new ones as your business needs dictate. This allows you to deploy business applications you could not find the budget for, because you would have had to include the cost of buying and maintaining the hardware to run them on.

A VDC allows you to build and move on extremely quickly, far faster than when you operated physical machines. It is a simple matter to create a new virtual server, and deploying business applications, or creating new ones, is a lot easier and faster too.

Data Protection and Disaster Recovery

By storing data off-site, you are mitigating the risk of loss of data in the event of a critical incident affecting your business premises where you house your physical datacenter. In addition, the task of making backups is much simpler and faster too, and because the servers are virtual, they can be deployed with a few mouse clicks – in the event a virtual server is down, for whatever reason, another can be made live almost instantly.

Energy Savings

Running a datacenter eats up a lot of power, not least to keep everything running cool. You may not be a “green” or into tree-hugging, but no matter, you will be saving a great deal of money on your power bills, plus still helping out the environment.

Server Consolidation

While you can increase the number of resources available to your business, you will also enjoy the benefit of being able to consolidate and optimize server resources. Moving over to a VDC automatically means a reduction in physical machines, however this does not mean they are now redundant – consider using them as a test environment for your in-house team.

Old-style IT doctrine also typically means, one application/one server, e.g. Microsoft Exchange, which was done to isolate applications, however this resulted in “server sprawl” and significant under-utilization of server resources, while adding to the cost. With a VDC, one physical machine may house multiple virtual servers, so application isolation and compatibility issues are still achieved, but without server waste.

Extend the Life of Legacy Applications

You probably have more than one old application running somewhere in your business. Probably operating off a 10 year old PC covered with dust, set up by an IT admin whose name you can’t recall!

Nevertheless, you still get a lot of use out of these old applications, and changing them over may not be within your budget, or the business disruption is just too much to handle right now?

So, move them over to a virtual environment, and this will allow them to continue to run and usually with enhanced uptime. It will not avoid the need to tackle them eventually, but you will cheaply and effectively extend their useful life to your business.

 

Swift Systems is a veteran-owned IT security specialist, operating its own data center and helps secure government and highly;y-sensitive private sector data and networks.

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